Windows XP Reboot Loop (+ Blue Screen Of Death)

[JohnNada]

Hi,

Yesterday I tried to reboot my PC after having left it on all night. I got as far as the Windows XP splash screen before the blue screen of death appeared suddenly for about half a second (Not enough for me to read what the actual error is) and the computer began rebooting again. It now continues in this reboot loop no matter which mode I try to boot up in.

I recently tried to install another 2GB of RAM on top of the 2GB of RAM that I already have, but it turns out that the new RAM was faulty (I was going to buy it second hand from a friend). Ever since then I have noticed that my RAM has been lagging, and my PC is struggling with tasks that it didn't struggle with before.

I doubt it has anything to do with the problem but I also installed a brand new soundcard recently. On top of that, I downloaded four different archive files (Both .rar and .zip) using Emule recently, which all turned out to be corrupted. It strikes me as slightly odd that all four of them would be corrupted, and in my haste I forgot to virus scan them, so I'm wondering if maybe they contained viruses.

If anybody could offer me any suggestions as to what the problem is likely to be, and how to solve it on as tight a budget as possible, I would be extremely appreciative. I'm a struggling freelance documentary maker and I simply cannot live without my computer. I also cannot afford to lose any of the data on my hard drives.

Personally I suspect that the RAM is the issue, but I'm hardly an expert on these matters.

Thanks in advance...

 

[strategic]

I don't know if I can be much help, but I'm willing to bet it's the sound card (if you claim the memory is not corrupted, you need to keep in mind although it isn't common, your memory could become faulty just by removing it if not done properly). First, you''l have to try removing the sound card to see if you can eliminate the BSOD, so you can perform a memtest ( https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic62524.html ). Also upon replying, you may want to state what the specs of your computer, o/s etc., any beeep sequences on start up could also help. Once you get it to start you could also do a virus scan ( https://www.techspot.com/community/...lware-removal-preliminary-instructions.58138/ ) Normally, those archive files shouldn't be a problem, but thats not to say they aren't, if you have security software installed, you should have real-time protection and your software should see an error immediately and reply with a warning. If need be, you have to try booting off of you o/s CD.